Ollendick and King review available evidence for the superiority of ESTs. Considerable support exists for the assertions that ESTs perform significantly better than non-ESTs and that their promulgation and dissemination ought to continue, and it might be suggested, at an even greater pace. The chapter concludes with a dialogue among the contributors in which they emphasize their points of agreement and disagreement.

Evidence-based practice and empirically supported treatment movements are potent forces that affect the practice of psychology today and have the potential to mandate the types of treatments psychologists conduct. The histories of these movements reveal that certain aspects of therapy valued by psychologists have been ignored. It is shown that the evidence-based movements (a) overemphasize treatments and treatment differences and (b) ignore aspects of psychotherapy that have been shown to be related to outcome, such as variation among psychologists, the relationship, and other common factors. It is important that psychologists understand the development of these movements so that they can be critical consumers of research and can effectively influence the future course of events.

Where oh where are the specific ingredients? A meta-analysis of component studies in counseling and psychotherapy.

Component studies, which involve comparisons between a treatment package and the treatment package without a theoretically important component or the treatment package with an added component, use experimental designs to test whether the component is necessary to produce therapeutic benefit. A meta-analysis was conducted on 27 component studies culled from the literature. It was found that the effect size for the difference between a package with and without the critical components was not significantly different from zero, indicating that theoretically purported important components are not responsible for therapeutic benefits. Moreover, the effect sizes were homogeneous, which suggests that there were no important variables moderating effect sizes. The results cast doubt on the specificity of psychological treatments.

This chapter explores the evidence for the efficacy and outcomes of individual counseling and psychotherapy. The first question addressed is whether counseling and psychotherapy generally lead to positive outcomes. The evidence convincingly supports the belief that psychotherapy is efficacious, although it supports many different approaches. An attempt is made to clarify the empirical evidence by differentiating common factor models and specific ingredient models. The second question addressed in this review is whether the general effects of counseling and psychotherapy are due to the commonalities that underlie most approaches or to the specific ingredients of each particular approach.